How to get free degrees during quarantine

Our world trip didn’t go as we planned, in the 8th month the coronavirus hit the world. But after the first shock, we tried to make the best out of it, this is how we ended up having free degrees during the quarantine! We show you how can you still do it during the summer of 2020!

6 months and dozen of countries were behind our back when the first news arrived. China, Lunar New Year and the new virus, but most of us believed (or rather hoped?) that it will be contained and a pandemic would not start. We were wrong.

We have spent the Lunar New Year in Thailand (it was a quite particular celebration, not what we were expecting from this holiday), where there were only a handful of sick people – yet it was the second affected country -, then we visited Cambodia and Vietnam, where we felt safe and far from the disease. Weeks of wondrous sights made us feel being in a dream, unaware that this will turn into a nightmare soon.

The second week in Vietnam welcomed us in the south. After half month of wandering in the north among bioluminescent planktons, floating villages, breathtaking boatrides by limestone mountains and caves made us forget what is going on in the world. But as soon as we reached the south, Vietnam, that had no Covid-19 cases for weeks, started to publish the new numbers. Within a handful of days the whole world turned upside down: Italy went on a full lockdown, Hungary closed its borders, the cases were sharply rising in Europe and every single country closed in front of our nose in Asia. The world trip what we have planned for a half decade was no more – and we cannot even go home together.

Luckily we had our plane ticket to Japan, our last resort. Not long after they closed their border as well. The numbers are raising here constantly, so better safe than sorry, we bunkered down in Osaka.

This is how our voluntary quarantine has started. Without a job, we needed to find out quickly how to spend X days time 24 hours (x is yet unknown in the equation). After reading the internet twice and getting upset, sad and miserable twice a day, we needed another approach. Luckily the digital nomad Facebook group gave us the answer: Udacity had an offer to join their courses, and since UTM codes, Hootsuite, content marketing, Google Analytics and many more topics, which is covered in the Digital Marketing Nanodegree, were daily part of my job and I really want to get to know more about them.

So here I am, using Hermione’s Time-Turner which brought me back to my university years. I am sitting in the lounge of the hotel, like 10 years ago in our dormitory kitchen and having an extended exam period: I wake up, sit down with the study notes, writing papers and eat ramen (yess, healthy food choices without a proper kitchen here!). But every cloud has a silver lining: this course gives me the opportunity to learn something I was interested in for years and actually, this is the first time I am committing myself fully to an online course which will give us a free degrees during the quarantine. Let’s graduate in April and let’s get back our normal life in the beginning of summer, as a better person.